HE little house, tell this story. It was lived within my walls; not a line is invented and it was I, by my interfering, who brought about the happy ending. Who wants a story that does not end happily, especially a Christmas story? To have been responsible for the happy ending is pretty nearly as clever as to have made the story up out of one's own head or, as we houses say, out of one's own walls.

Perhaps you never heard before of a house telling a story. If that be so, it is because you don't listen or because you go to bed too early. Unlike people, we houses sleep all day long; but after midnight we wake up and talk. When the clock strikes twelve, our stairs begin to crack and our windows to rattle and our floors to creak. If you ever hear these sounds, don't be frightened; they simply mean that the kind old walls that shelter you have begun to remember and to think. And we have so many things to remember and to think about, especially we old houses who have been standing for almost two hundred years. We have seen so much; we have been the friends of so many generations. More little children have been born beneath our roofs than we have stairs on which to count. We reckon things on our stairs, just as people reckon things on their fingers. When our stairs crack after midnight, it's usually because we're counting' the births and love-makings and marriages we have watched. We very often get them wrong because there are so many of them. Then the doors and windows and floors will chip in to correct us. “Ha,” a window will rattle, “you've forgotten the little girl who used to gaze through my panes in 1760 or thereabouts.” One of the doors will swing slowly on its hinges and, if anyone disputes with it, will bang, shouting angrily, “Wrong again—all wrong.” Then the walls and the windows and the doors and the floors all start whispering, trying to add up correctly the joys and sorrows they have witnessed in the years beyond recall.

When that happens, if you're awake and listening, you'll hear us start adding afresh, from the lowest to the topmost stair.

I am a London house and a very little house, standing in a fashionable square near Hyde Park. I have known my ups and downs. Once was the time when I was almost in the country and the link-boys used to make a fuss at having to escort my lady so far in her sedan-chair. It's a long way to the country now, for the city has spread out miles beyond me. Within sight through the trees at the end of the square red motor-buses pass, bumping their way rowdily down to Hammersmith and Kew. In my young days these places were villages, but I am told they are full of noises now. I have at least escaped that, for our square is a backwater of quiet and leads to nowhere, having an entrance only at one end. All the houses in the square were built at the same time as I was, which makes things companionable. We all look very much alike, with tiny areas, three stone steps leading up from the pavement, one window blinking out from the ground-floor, two blinking out from each of the other floors and a verandah running straight across us. In summer-time the verandah is gay with flowers. Our only difference is the colour we are painted, especially the colour of our doors. Mine is white; but some of our neighbours' are blue, some green, some red. We're very proud of the front-doors in our square. In the middle stands a railed-in garden, to which none but our owners have access. Its trees are as ancient as ourselves. Behind us, so hidden that it is almost forgotten, stands the grey parish-church, surrounded by a graveyard in which many of the people who have been merry in us rest.

For some years we were what is known as a “gone down neighborhood,” till a gentleman who writes books bought us cheap, put us in repair and rented us to his friends. This has made us very select; since then we have become again fashionable.

Now you know all that is necessary to form a mental picture of us. Because we are so small, we are sometimes spoken of as “Dolls' House Square.” All the things that I shall tell you I do not pretend to have witnessed, for houses have to spend their lives always in the one place—they cannot ride in taxis and move about. We gain our knowledge of how the world is changing by listening to the conversations of people who inhabit us; when night has fallen we mutter among ourselves, passing on to one another beneath the starlight down the lamp-lit streets the gossip we have overheard. Whatever of importance we miss, the churchbells tell us. Big Ben, with his sweet tenor voice, booming out the hours, is in this respect particularly thoughtful.

So now, having explained myself, I come to my story of the little lady who needed to be loved, but did not know it, and the wounded officer who wanted rest.